Various types of body closures are known in the prior art which are utilized to maintain cargo within the otherwise opened top load bed of a truck or other vehicle. The prior art reveals numerous cover means for trash, pickup, and dump trucks and other vehicles; such covers being manually and/or power operated.
Most of these devices were developed to prevent the expensive loss of lightweight cargo such as dirt, trash, gravel, silage and the like from the truck during transport. A large number of the covers, including U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,067,603 and 3,168,345, are collapsible covers which are folded toward the vehicle cab when it is desired to partially open the load bed. These collapsible covers often are subject to malfunction because of the numerous related parts which are subject to failure.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,913,969 to N. Hoch is directed to a single, rigid, extremely heavy top member hinged near the upper front edge of the load bed body, which top is raised and lowered by means of hydraulic cylinders. The Hoch apparatus most nearly approaches the present invention in its most basic concept. However, the Hoch invention is directed to a permanently mounted cargo cover installed by the manufacturer and having a relatively expensive hydraulic lifting means necessitated by the heavy weight of the cover.
None of the devices known to applicant are easily adaptable to existing silage trucks and operable by the driver in the cab from the vehicle electrical system.